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Alex de Waal African Union High-Level Implementation Panel Papers

 Collection
Call Number: MS201

Scope and Contents

This collection contains reports, agendas, draft and final agreements, press releases, memorandums, negotiation strategies, and personal reflections of Alex de Waal during his time as an expert advisor to the African Union High-Level Panel on Darfur and the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan from 2005 to 2012. Many documents were created to inform chief negotiators and other interested parties about the changing political situations in Sudan and Darfur in order to provide recommendations for their efforts.

Dates

  • Creation: 1986 -- 2013

Creator

Language of Materials

English

Arabic

French

Access

This collection contains some restricted material. Restrictions related to specific material are noted in the Detailed Contents List in each series.

Conditions Governing Use

Some material in this collection may be protected by copyright and other rights. Please see “Reproductions and Use” on the Digital Collections and Archives website for more information about reproductions and permission to publish. Any intellectual property rights that the donor possesses have been retained by the donor during his lifetime. Requests for reproduction must be referred to the donor.

Biographical / Historical

Alexander de Waal (1963- ) was born in Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1963. He received his D.Phil in 1988 in social anthropology at Nuffield College, Oxford after completing his thesis on the 1984-1985 Darfur famine in Sudan. He is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and teaches courses at The Fletcher School. An activist and scholar, his work focuses on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS governance in Africa, and conflict and peacebuilding.

In 1990 Alex de Waal joined the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. He resigned in December 1992 in protest for Human Rights Watch’s support for the American military involvement in Somalia. He was the first chairman of the Mines Advisory Group at the beginning of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In 1993 he set up African Rights, a human rights organization that documented human rights abuses. In 1999 he set up and served as the director for Justice Africa, which focused on developing policies to respond to human rights crises, notably in Rwanda, Somalia and Sudan.

From 1997 to 2001, he focused on avenues to peaceful resolution of Second Sudanese Civil War. In 2001, he returned to his work on health in Africa, writing on the intersection of HIV/AIDS, poverty and drought. As the Sudanese conflict worsened in 2004, he returned to his doctoral thesis topic of Darfur.

Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), de Waal was the program director at the Social Science Research Council on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crisis in Africa (2006-09).

From November 2005 to May 2006, de Waal was an advisor to the African Union mediation team for Darfur. Following the signing of the 2006 Darfur Peace Agreement, he was an informal advisor to the African Union and the Darfur-Darfur Dialogue and Consultation process from June 2006 to March 2009. He also advised Abdul Mohammed, head of political affairs for UNAMID. He was an advisor to the African Union Panel on Darfur (March 2009-October 2009) He was a full-time advisor to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel from January 2010 to June 2011. Beginning in July 2011 he was a part-time adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel.

His published books include, Famine that kills: Darfur Sudan (1989), Famine crimes: politics and the disaster relief industry in Africa (1997), Islamism and its enemies in the Horn of Africa (2004), Darfur: A Short History of a Long War (2005), AIDS and power: why there is no political crisis—yet (2006), and War in Darfur and the search for peace (2007).

Extent

2.4 Linear Feet

4206 Digital Object(s)

Arrangement

This collection is organized into three series: Darfur mediation records; African Union High-Level Implementation Panel records; and Prospect for Peace briefings.

Custodial History

This collection was transferred from Alex to the World Peace Foundation. The DCA copied the files from the World Peace Foundation's network drive to our facilities for archival management.

This collection was part of a series of collections the World Peace Foundation collected as part of their grant "Documentation, Research and Writing on the African Union High Level Implementation Panel for Sudan" funded by the United States Institute of Peace.

Related Materials

MS205. Dave Mozersky African Union High-Level Implementation Panel papers. DCA.

MS206. Laura James African Union High-Level Implementation Panel papers. DCA.

MS207. Neha Erasmus African Union High-Level Implementation Panel papers. DCA.

Processing Information

This collection was processed during the summer of 2013 by Elspeth Macdonald, Margaret Tiernan, Jasmine Bhatia, Massaab al-Aloosy, and Devika de Puy Kamp, Fletcher students and supervised by Erin Faulder, Archivist for Digital Collections. Whenever possible, the material is described in its original order. Due to the nature of born-digital materials, original order was perceived to be alphabetical by folder name and chronological within each folder. Titles were taken from the original document when they existed. Every effort was made to represent the original file structure within the description. Where necessary, some file structures were collapsed for descriptive simplicity. The original file path and file name is recorded within each item's record.

In January-February 2015, Tim Walsh (DCA Archives and Research Assistant) generated checksums for all digital objects in this collection; performed QA work on digital object metadata; and created PDF/A preservation copies of 3,421 word processing files, Powerpoint files, and other textual objects in the collection. Two files, MS201.003.00033.doc and MS201.002.00811.docx, were found to be corrupted. No preservation copies of these objects were made.

During migration to a new Fedora database in May 2018, two files were found to be exact duplicates: MS201.002.01601 was an exact duplicate of MS201.002.01600, and MS201.002.01613 was an exact duplicate of MS201.002.01612. These files were removed from the finding aid by Collections Management Archivist Adrienne Pruitt and deleted from the database.

Processing status

This collection is processed.

Repository Details

Part of the Tufts Archival Research Center Repository

Contact:
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Tufts University
Medford Massachusetts 02155 United States
617-627-3737